As we sit talking in his Birkenhead flat, one-time riot ringleader Paul Taylor’s mobile phone rings. I shoot him a puzzled look.

Why? Because this is the man who orchestrated the Strangeways riot, oversaw the near-destruction of Manchester’s Victorian jail and helped anarchy spread like a virus through Britain’s penal system. And yet he chooses as his ringtone...a police siren. The irony is not lost on him.

“Although I’ve broken the law in my life, I actually have respect for the law, I have admiration for the law and I grew up wanting to be a police officer,” says Taylor, now aged 45.

Taylor is a man of huge contradictions. He will quote at length from legal text books on the principles of sentencing. Yet for all his fine words, he admits he meted out instant, savage justice to an alleged sex offender during the mayhem at the start of the Strangeways riot.

He is the man who bloody-mindedly refused to negotate with authorities throughout the 25-day course of the riot.

And yet he now sets himself a vainglorious mission to present a ‘Sacred Peace Plan’ for the Middle East to any politicians and religious leaders who will listen.

Strangeways: The prison officer's story

Strangeways: The day the rooftop rebels took over

Strangeways: The governor's story

The porcelain angel and the Buddha on his shelves suggest a free-thinking man of peace and spiritual depth, yet much of his life has been spent in a succession of institutions.

Asked for his thoughts now on the Strangeways riot, he expresses pride that he was “able to orchestrate a rebellion that led to progress in the prison service”.

But Taylor now regrets the violence, and would not advocate riot to others today.

After a 12-month sentence for handling stolen goods nine years ago, he has gone straight.

“I’ve not been in trouble with the law since. I’m very concerned not to break the law any more because I don’t want to cause my family any additional heartache,” he says.

When Taylor gave an impassioned speech from the roof of Strangeways on the fourth day of the riot, I was a news reporter sitting yards away in a partly-disused building overlooking the jail. Bizarrely, we share the same name, so the Manchester Evening News’s first report naming this riot ringleader Paul Taylor appeared under the byline “by Paul Taylor”.

Taylor spent much of his childhood in care, including four years at a home in Northumberland with a brutal regime, and a spell at a home in Cheshire where, at the age of 12, he says he was sexually abused.

Running away from care, stealing a car in one escapade, Taylor graduated to the adult prison system, where he battled constantly with prison officers. Various other offences took him back and back to prison.

Savagery

“I was approached by police when I was in prison in Staffordshire in 1986,” he says. “They were investigating a Warrington home where a lot of abuse had taken place. I didn’t tell the police officers at that time that I’d been abused because I felt ashamed and embarrassed. Now I don’t feel any shame and I don’t feel embarrassed.”

But Taylor does believe his childhood experiences, and those of other prisoners, had a bearing on the savagery which occurred in the first frenzied hours of the Strangeways riot.

By spring 1990, Strangeways was very overcrowded – 1,647 prisoners in a jail with a certified normal accommodation of 970 . But the regime under reforming governor Brendan O’Friel had been improving, with workshops, classes and association.

Taylor insists he had “admiration and respect” for O’Friel.

“I could see the changes he was trying to introduce because he was a man of humanity and a man of God,” he adds.

But you took that jail from O’Friel and all but destroyed it, I point out to Taylor. He replies that it was his complaints about prison officers – the “hostile relationship between prisoners and staff” – that drove him to riot.

So on April 1, during Sunday service run by chaplain Noel Proctor, Taylor strode down the aisle of the chapel, grabbed the microphone and started ranting about these alleged injustices. Taylor felled a prison officer, other prisoners grabbed keys from the stricken man’s belt and the riot was underway.

Taylor made a point of seeking out a prisoner who – he had read in the Manchester Evening News – had come to Strangeways accused of the attempted rape of a six-year old girl.

“I did seek him out, I did find him and we did attack him quite badly,” he recalls. “He was thrown from the landing onto the netting after being beaten, then he was attacked by young prisoners as well. He was quite severely injured.”

Though Taylor says he now regrets all his acts of violence that day, he adds: “A lot of prisoners had come through the care system and had been physically or sexually abused.

They feel outraged when they read in the newspapers of a child or woman or elderly person attacked. Their outrage is rooted in their own experience as well as their humanity.”

After O’Friel was stopped by prison authorities from attempting to re-take Strangeways on the second day, the riot became a siege, a stalemate and a long-running media circus. For over three weeks, Taylor – with his distinctive Mohican haircut – and his fellow rioters held court on the roof.

'Come down, son'

He could hear his mother Lillian shouting from the cordons, at first encouraging him “You stand up for your rights, son”, but eventually counselling him “Come down, son. It’s gone on long enough”.

When an assault to re-take the prison was finally sanctioned, on April 25 1990, there were just six rioters left, and Taylor was the last to submit, stepping into a cherry-picker to bring him down to earth.

Taylor makes a point now of saying that he protected certain prison officers and the chaplain from further harm during the riot – a claim corroborated by Proctor. But the trauma of the riot still had devastating effects on the lives of some prison officers.

By the time he came to trial, Taylor’s original sentence was over and he was again a remand prisoner. Apart from ten years in jail for the riot, he earned an extra three for trying to influence the jury.

He had the jurors followed, then sent letters to their home addresses, enclosing newspaper clippings detailing the crimes of the sex offenders who had been beaten in the riot. Even now, he does not seem to fully comprehend how such a letter would strike dread in the heart of a juror.

It was, he says, a “beautifully-crafted letter”, adding: “I was trying to philosophically persuade them. It wasn’t a threatening letter or intimidating letter.”

Today, Taylor’s days are spent doing part-time driving work for his father, who runs shuttle services to airports in the north west, acting as a “mentor” to his nieces and nephews and cogitating on his mission for peace in the Middle East.

The riot he started resulted in Lord Justice Woolf’s inquiry – the most searching examination ever of our penal system. Taylor says that there have been “dramatic changes” for the better in our prisons in the last 20 years. But he is determined not to go back inside.

“Prisons are universities of crime,” he says “Prisons should be universities and institutions of further education to aid and assist in rehabilitation.

“I turned my life around on my own, because I felt a responsibility to my family as well as myself.”

After our interview, Taylor rings me to apologise for having been “distracted” during the latter half of our chat. Talking about the abuse he suffered in care had plainly been a shock to his system.

In the course of our conversations, Taylor has quoted Cicero, Henry James, Wordsworth, Dryden, Bertolt Brecht and Tolstoy. But when he rings, Taylor wants to leave me with a quote of his own: “Prison is a strange place,” he says. “It maketh man act in strange ways”.